I always admire the thought and care that go into Jerry Friedman’s contributions to the List. This latest one does not disappoint. 

I agree with much of what JF says. The differences between us may finally come down mainly to matters of taste (I don’t generally like ghost stories, SF, or fantasy) and of attitude (I’m a glass-half-empty guy; JF, apparently, often sees the glass as half full). 

As for the connection between “not text, but texture” and Shade’s final embrace of personal immortality, I see a logical gap where JF sees a (logical?) development. At the end of the poem, Shade’s feeling is one of “all’s right with the world”--a feeling consistent with having just finished an intense and difficult labor which has involved in part his coming to terms with grief (or at least thinking he has). It is in this mood that he produces both the conceit--surely it is no more than a bit of poetic fancy--that the universe throbs to an iambic meter and also his conviction that Hazel “somewhere is alive.” 

It’s also worth pointing out that the words “faint hope” are tricky. At the very least, as JF agrees, they represent a marked deflation of mood. But they could also mean something even more abrupt. They could mean the fainting away of hope. They could also be an expression of self-sarcasm on the level of “yeah, right.”

JF: “I'd add that at the ends of both Invitation to a Beheading and Bend Sinister, the connection between the author's higher world and a character's afterlife is visible (‘a good night for mothing’).”

JT: But the fact that one can do something in words (create metafictions, for example) is no evidence for the actual existence of a Great Writer in the Sky, let alone a whole series of them. The ontological argument has been dead for a long time. You can’t light your pipe with the word “match.” Outside of fiction, faith, mysticism, and more or less unfounded belief, death is a great deal more than a wrinkle in language. When writers fall into such confusions, I’m reminded of what Kierkegaard said about Hegel et al.: “In relation to their systems most systematizers are like a man who builds an enormous castle and lives in a shack close by; they do not live in their own enormous systematic buildings.” 

I agree with all four of JF’s numbered comments at the end of his message, except that I would go farther than JF on the question of the originality of VN’s alleged metaphysical beliefs. Consider this quote:

Time, space, and natural law hold for me suggestions of intolerable bondage, and I can form no picture of emotional satisfaction which does not involve their defeat--especially the defeat of time, so that one may merge oneself with the whole historic stream and be wholly emancipated from the transient and the ephemeral. 

Nabokov? No, it was H. P. Lovecraft, a writer whose fiction I can't bear to read. The few serious metaphysicians (and scientists) who have held that time doesn’t exist have produced elaborate arguments for their conclusions. They have not settled for clever metafictions, feelings of “intolerable bondage,” or outlandish mythologies.

One last point. Earlier I wrote that Pale Fire could be read either as a statement of skepticism or as a profession of faith. But of course there’s a third possibility, namely that the novel dramatizes the uncertainty between skepticism and faith (and a good many other things as well). This reading, which goes back a long way, is the one that in fact I endorse.

Jim Twiggs